This is a Shirley card.
And if you developed color film between the 1940s and the 1990s
the accuracy of the colors in your photos was largely based on this skin-tone.
Shirley was probably the the name of the first person who was pictured on the cards.
And Shirley became the subsequent name of the all of the people pictured on the cards.
That's Lorna Roth, a professor and researcher at Concordia University in Montreal.
She's been studying race, representation, and technology for well over 20 years.
Usually they were very white women who wore very colorful dresses.
Color film works like this.
There are layers of chemicals stacked on each other that are sensitive to different colors
of light and there are a series of different types of chemical solutions that are used
to develop them once exposed to that light.
A combination of all of these chemicals creates a film's color balance and for many decades
chemicals that would bring out various reddish, yellow, and brown tones were largely left
out.
The consumer market that was designated in the design of film chemistry was that of a
lighter skinned market.
So, when defining what an idealized skin tone would be, it turned out to be a lighter skin
tone than a darker skin tone.
It wasn't until the 1970s where things started to change.
Companies that were advertising different kinds of wood furnitures were complaining
that
Kodak film did not render the difference between dark grained wood and light grained wood.
The other companies that Kodak responded to were chocolate makers
because the film couldn't render the difference between dark and milk chocolate.
If you want to sell in the global marketplace, you can't just have whiteness as the dominant
basis for your technologies.
As the film and television industries became more diverse,
color balance issues at the professional level became more apparent
and in the 1990s a team of designers at Philips in Breda, Holland tackled the issue head on
by developing a camera system that used two different computer chips to balance lighter
and darker skin tones individually.
The first people to buy these cameras, they were called the LDK series, were Oprah Winfrey
and Black Entertainment Television.
People who were very aware of these issues.
It was around this time that the White Shirley card was joined by the black Shirley card,
the Latino Shirley card, and the multiracial Shirley card.
And Kodak's Gold Max marketing campaign emphasized their film's improved dynamic
range.
If you were his parents would you trust this moment to anything other than Kodak Gold Film?
No other film in the world gives you truer color than Kodak Gold.
Today color film and digital camera sensors have a much broader dynamic range,
but the default towards lighter skin in technology still lingers.
Digital sensors, for the most part, still look for the lightest area of the frame and
automatically calibrate to that.
One of the big mistakes emerged in 2009. I'm sure you heard about it.
My co-worker Wanda and I are sitting in front of an HP media smart computer.
It's supposed to follow me as I move. I'm black.
I think my blackness is interfering with my computer's ability to follow me.
So she moved this way, and the camera followed her.
And then he would get into the screen and it would be completely stable.
No face recognition anymore buddy!
The fact is, there is still a cultural bias towards lighter skin, certainly in how we use technology,
and sometimes, still, within the technology itself.
It was when I was talking to Bryan Harris at the Black Entertainment Television network
in the U.S. when he said,
'You know color film could have been developed very differently had black people developed
it they would've taken very different factors into consideration.'
And of course, he's right.
Technology should be the ultimate equalizer. It should serve everyone's needs without
an inherent bias.
If a child is born into a society where all of the range of skin tones is the obvious
norm, than they could no longer assume that whiteness is the default.